Technical

Historically, issues that might arise when using Zabbix have not been easy to troubleshoot. Not everything that would be useful is always logged. Log level can be increased, but those who still remember the first time they saw what DebugLevel=4 can do will understand why that option usually helped more advanced users. Besides, changing the […]

In Zabbix versions before 2.4, notification (action) conditions were limited to three predefined options – “AND”, “OR”, “AND/OR”. Zabbix 2.4 adds a new option – Custom expression. This results in full freedom when deciding how all the different conditions should be handled.

Also known as that minor improvement some people just love. We already discussed most web monitoring related improvements for Zabbix 2.4, but there’s this one tiny thing left… an increase for the maximum URL length.

In these Zabbix 2.4 feature series we have already seen some improvements for the built-in web monitoring – the ability to specify custom headers and control redirects. Web monitoring got improved further – let’s explore the new options regarding SSL authentication. There are two of them: Verifying SSL certificates Supplying client certificate

Continuing with the improvements for the upcoming Zabbix 2.4, there are several improvements for the web monitoring. In previous versions Zabbix always followed redirects and retrieved the full page – now both of these things can be controlled.  

Zabbix 2.4 is the upcoming major Zabbix version. While initially scheduled to be released in May 2014, it will be slightly delayed – Zabbix team is working hard, but there’s still a lot they would like to include in this release. While the new version is being baked, we can already start looking at the […]

Zabbix virtual appliance has been available for quite a long time now. It includes Zabbix server, agent and frontend, and everything is working out of the box. So far it has always been available in 32bit mode, to make it run on as wide range of platforms as possible. With the new Zabbix 2.0.8 release, […]

Creating complex maps is a time-consuming job. Actually, even designing a rather small map of 25 elements can take you an hour. That’s time you rather want to spend on something useful or fun, unless you’ve got a fetish for repetitive work. All we need to automate this task, is a network/graph library like Networkx […]

Until Zabbix 2.0.7 proxies used a simple algorithm for their configuration synchronization – overwriting the old configuration with a new one. Even unchanged records were updated. It produced a lot of SQL updates even when there were no changes in configuration. It worked good enough until one user wanted to synchronize a heavy loaded proxy […]

One of the questions for those of us that use Zabbix on a large scale is “Just how much data can Zabbix ingest before it blows up spectacularly?” Some of the work I’ve been doing lately revolves around that question. I have an extremely large environment (around 32000+ devices) that could potentially be monitored entirely […]

Zabbix offers a lot of methods for data gathering, including SNMP. SNMP has been a popular protocol for many years and probably will stay that way – it’s used on routers, switches, UPS devices, storage arrays and lots of other devices.  Zabbix 2.2 will improve the existing SNMP support in several ways.

Some might recall that back in 2011 we dug into old logfiles and produced a 5 year graph of Zabbix user count in the #zabbix IRC channel. At the same time, monitoring at a higher rate – hourly – was set up, and data collection started. Now that it’s been 2 years since that graph, let’s […]